Stories

Mad Mimi is an email service that lets you elegantly create, send, and track all of the emails that your business (or client!) needs. Over 17,000 businesses use Mad Mimi to handle email the simple way. With mad_mimi_mailer, Mad Mimi now gives Rails apps an out-of-the-box transactional email API that's even easier than doing it yourself. You can also follow MadMimi on twitter to see what she's up to.

Daniel Wanja wrote up a quick little tutorial on getting your Rails application to work with the new Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS provides you with a hosted MySQL database that can be easily backed up and grown over time. They also claim to be adding support for high-availability, by syncing your database in real-time across availability zones, soon.

Diego Carrion created a new continuous integration server call Signal. It not only runs your application's test suite, but it will also run and track your app's metrics, too. It's written as a Rails application with background job support, so it's super easy and familiar to get running.

openplaces recently released an adapter for Rails called BigRecord. With BigRecord, you gain an ActiveRecord-like interface (with migration support, even!) to Goog'es BigTable storage system. So, if you need large table support that easily integrates with Rails and local ActiveRecord objects, this may just be for you.

mail, a pure Ruby library for generating, parsing, and sending email, by Mikel Lindsaar may be worth a look - that is, of course, if you're into that kinda thing. It gives you fairly low-level access to managing messages, but with a very clean, RFC-compliant, and simple interface. One interesting feature, is that it also gives you access to send errors so that you may handle any exceptional cases however suits your application best.

Alex Reisner sent in an email last week letting us know about his Geocoder gem for Rails. Like a lot of other libraries out there, it can give you lat. and long. for an address and provides you with helpers for finding nearby locations. But, unlike many others, it's database agnostic, which means you can easily use it in a local Sqlite development database.

Last Friday, Twitter released their new List feature which allows you to organize your Twitter feeds. Immediately following the roll out, John Nunemaker's Twitter gem was also updated to add List support.

If you've got any interesting lists which may be of use to other Rubyists in the community, please drop a comment with the URL and share the love. :)

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The Twitter Song played on this show was created by Ben Walker, and the full version and video can be viewed here.

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